Open Letter to Stardock

Open Letter to Stardock

Don't give up on Asymmetrical 4X!

I'm Marlowe221 (Micah, out here in the non-internet world). I've been a 4X player since the mid 90s and I'm a writer/editor/grammar monkey over at Explorminate.

I know that SK and SK:R have been commercially disappointing for the company. As a gamer and a customer, there were things about the game that I really liked but I also found myself pretty disappointed with the game(s) in the end. I could go into the reasons for that if anyone is interested but it's not the reason I am making this post.

I joined the founder's program for Sorcerer King because I was very excited about the game, and there is one big reason for that. I was very excited about the concept of an asymmetrical 4X game.

Why, I hear you ask, helpfully? Because, 98% percent of the time the AI in 4X games is pretty awful. The AI can never be as good at the game as a human player and 4X games are often complex enough that even teaching an AI to be competent is an accomplishment worth celebrating. Even Brad himself, widely regarded as a wizard of 4X AI though he is, faces these limits. He is the best, but crafting a human level AI in a 4X game is simply unreasonable for players to expect.

But an asymmetrical 4X game changes all of that. Once the AI is following its own set of rules, is pursuing its own goals, and playing its own game, we don't have to worry about whether or not it measures up to a human player's capabilities. At that point, the purpose of the AI is to create a credible obstacle for the player to overcome through strategic decision making. Rather than the human player and the AI racing toward the same finish line, the player must adjust his/her strategy to account for the very different goals of the AI.

What I want to encourage Brad and the rest of the team to do is this - don't give up on the concept of asymmetrical 4X games! SK and SK:R may not have worked out like you hoped they would. But personally, I do not believe the reason for that is because the basic concept of the game is bad. On the contrary, it's one of the most innovative ideas that the genre has seen in at least a decade. Asymmetrical games solve a lot of the problems with AI competence that have plagued the genre since Master of Orion 2.

Even if SK or Elemental do not survive as IPs on which future games are based, they have introduced a lot of great ideas and mechanics to the 4X world and I sincerely hope some of those make the leap to future games from Stardock. To me, the concept of asymmetrical play is one of the best of those ideas. Please do not allow the lackluster sales of SK and SK:R to deter you from pursuing the concept in the future.

This is awesome on so many levels. I didn't even know SK was a thing. However, it does have a 7 on Gamespot.

I've said it before, but I want nothing more than for Stardock to succeed. Pump 3,000 jobs into Detroit. It's really a nice area, if they just could attract more IT people. Windsor, Frankenmuth, Ann Arbor are sweet. There is no diminishing what Brad has already done on that front.

The debugger person me says that SK might suffer from "fatal-flaw" syndrome--as in, most startup companies out there really do have something good to offer, but 90% fail because of some fatal flaw. Granted, Stardock does not fit the criteria for a startup (300 employees, in existence since 2001). I'm just saying it might be the same problem: it's like you do really well at X, but no one ever thought of Y, and that's the thing that kills you.

Stardock just got done putting in hours of work revamping Galactic Civilizations 3, only to be disappointed by the reviews they got, and it's demoralizing. In fact, it sounds like Brad specifically tried to improve the Steam reviews, and it didn't. SK has a 7 out of 10, and that translates into sales. Is that "fair"? What is "fair"? Consumer products guys get raked over the coals on Amazon all the time. Yelp is brutal. It's like asking Simon Cowell if he's fair to American Idol contestants: Simon got to be there because of his knack for predicting the market. It's neither fair nor unfair--it's just how it is.

There is a phenomenon where Innovator A creates some really cool invention, but for whatever reason gets very little credit for it. Then Innovator B comes along and basically steals the idea, and makes millions. Sorceror King is sounding like an Innovator A, and we need to get them out of the Innovator A zone. Apple was successful at it (they fended off Microsoft). Netscape was not.